


Concrete Seconds

by MorganMikhailov (TheFire_in_the_NightSky)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Auto-Fiction, Catharsis, Memoirs, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Other, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV First Person, Past Relationship(s), therapeutic writing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-21
Updated: 2019-10-25
Packaged: 2020-09-23 02:56:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20332897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheFire_in_the_NightSky/pseuds/MorganMikhailov
Summary: Poetical practise of memoir or auto-fiction.





	1. The Window at the End of the Hall was My Favourite

**Author's Note:**

> [2010]

I painted him notes on the shower door glass, on our walls. Well, we both did. Elaborate, pretty ones; ugly, metaphorical ones; veiled pleadings. Words in French that he covered up with CD inserts when shit got too heavy, because paint was even heavier in our absences. Pull out a thumbtack, and _ presto! _We unpaused the song.

This is how we conversed sometimes. Opened up through lyrical syntax. 

Sometimes neither of us were the right Door to the other.

I liked to trail my fingers through the grooves of his rough brush strokes, feel the plaster patches catch my callouses beneath smooth burgundy. I wanted to melt into those cluttered walls, sometimes. Become just another swirl of black filigree that bordered a myriad of jambs.

“...Red’s supposed to cause nightmares. I liked that idea,” he said, once.

I wonder what he was trying to induce when we painted those strange, angling walls stark white, years on. We repainted them again, of course. The brightness of it would've never suited us. But the evidence of that layer remained dripped upon glossy, cherry-stained floorboards. We didn't bother scraping it away.

  
**_ Beware, _indeed.**


	2. Perhaps We Used to Be Selkies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [2008]

I liked us best when we were on the blackness of the beach after midnight. Drunk on bourbon and one another's flawed company. The quietness – sucked right up into it like spindly shadows.

And then he let our friends absorb it, shine a light on it like city lights shuttering the stars.

I much preferred when we only had waves giving their commentary. Less obnoxious. Older.

But once, when a friend – dear to me then – tagged along, bio-luminescent phytoplankton marked our steps. Such a specific wonder. We lit up the shore like an envy-green aurora.

Just once, and never again.

I think I might've loved her that night. And I think he always knew.


	3. I am Narcissus's Reflection.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [2007 - 2013]

He was always trying to change his body. Expand the narrowness of his hips; the sharp, sinewy curves of muscle winding over bone; the rectangular shape of him. But oh, how I envied every piece of him; every movement a melody he'd yet to craft.

Sometimes I pretended we shared parts of the same body, and sometimes, he wordlessly let me. Let me paint a story in my head with Caravaggio eyes and hands. It was this strange, taboo secret settled in between us, unacknowledged except for in the moment.

Perhaps it was narcissism.

I think somewhere down the line we melted into one another. Loved each other more than ourselves, so we let the lines – the boundaries – blur and bleed until the fluidity reached frayed edges. But we were two torn pieces of a whole that just wouldn't fit together proper any longer. 

Our reality was liminal.

“You can let go,” I whispered, the ocean in ours ears, a raindrop following the line of my nose as the clouds opened in earnest.

“I'm afraid of what I might do to you if I let go. That's why I have to hold myself back.” Words spoken wetly near my own mouth, from tears or rain upon lips, I do not remember. 

We were the monsters hiding in each other's shadows for so, so very long. The Jabberwocky trying to claw past silver-backed glass.

Did we just dream the other up? Conjured flesh and blood and bones that were wrong with a thought? Matching graphite-tattoos, pressed together whenever we were palm-to-palm. Scars, too perfect. We always found that funny.

Now, you are all my life a spectre.


End file.
